At their recent annual general meeting, the Seattle Sounders (MLS) team management announced that their focus in preparing for the upcoming season would include sport science. In that effort, the Seattle Sounders have become the first team in the MLS to acquire Fatigue Science’s analytic technology for their players.
Joining a growing list of professional sport teams seeking to quantify the effects of sleep on their athletes’ performance, the Sounders are looking to enter the 2014 MLS season with a competitive edge by using Fatigue Science’s sleep data and analytics to coach their players to optimized game time performance.
As a West-coast team facing 34 games over the course of the season, 17 of them on the road, the opportunity to manage player fatigue levels using scientifically-validated technology is one that the team’s Head Fitness Coach, David Tenney, was quick to embrace:
“We are extremely happy to announce the addition of Fatigue Science to our athlete monitoring system in the 2014 season.” says Sounders Head Fitness Coach, David Tenney. “The Sounders believe the technology will bring us the added insight into the recovery abilities of our athletes during the gruelling MLS season. We look forward to using Fatigue Science — the Readibands and FAST )Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool) software to help optimize travel plans and training times. Sleep is the most critical piece of the recovery process post-game, and I haven’t seen a product out there that quantifies sleep patterns and quality better than Fatigue Science.”
The Sounders will be wearing Fatigue Science Readibands, a wrist-worn device that tracks micro-movements of the wrist to measure the quantity, quality and timing of sleep and predict performance levels using patented fatigue-modelling algorithms. Players and team training staff will review individual and aggregate sleep profiles of the team then, leveraging the power of Fatigue Science’s performance modelling algorithms and FAST (Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool) software, use the data to plan for optimized game-time readiness.
“We’ve been working with other teams in the NHL, NFL, NBA, and around the world, to help manage player fatigue and optimize performance so it’s great to have our first MLS team on board with the technology”, Fatigue Science’s co-founder and fatigue expert Pat Byrne says, “David Tenney is leading the way with the Seattle Sounders in the MLS to embrace a more analytical approach to managing the team training and game preparation. We couldn’t be happier to be working with them.”
The Seattle Sounders’ 2014 season kicks off on Saturday, March 8th against 2013 MLS cup champions Sporting Kansas City.